Book Review

El Niño in History: Storming through the Ages. By César N. Caviedes. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. xiv + 279pp. $24.95.

These two books illustrate some of the charms—and perils—of using climate history to help understand social, economic, and political history. The difficulties are at least twofold. First, the record of climate history is spotty and imprecise. Before the late-nineteenth century it relies mainly on proxy evidence of one sort or another: tree rings, corals, air bubbles in glaciers and so on. But even within recent decades the evidence apparently is not unambiguous: In his account of the battle of Stalingrad, Caviedes says the winter of 1942–43 was severe; in his account, Brown states that it was not. The second difficulty is that there is no rigorous way to connect weather or climate change to historical events. Did drought help propel the Arab expansion of the seventh century? Did warmer weather encourage the Vikings to raid far and wide in the ninth-twelfth centuries? Did El Niño rains in 1532 make Pizarro's march to Cuzco easier? Maybe, but maybe not. In the context of several other simultaneous forces and trends, it is impossible to say with any assurance what role climate change or weather anomalies might have played in these events. Brown and Caviedes are more cautious than some others in this field, but nonetheless they occasionally run aground on the wilder shores of historical speculation.

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